Incandescent Lamp Version
Multiple segment alphanumeric displays are nearly as old as the use of electricity. A 1908 textbook describes an alphanumeric display system using incandescent lamps and a mechanical switching arrangement. Each of 21 lamps was connected to a switch operated by a set of slotted bars, installed in a rotating drum. This commutator assembly could be arranged so that as the drum was rotated, different sets of switches were closed and different letters and figures could be displayed. The scheme would have been used for "talking" signs to spell out messages, but a complete set of commutator switches, drums and lamps would have been required for each letter of a message, making the resulting sign quite expensive.
Read more about this topic: Fourteen-segment Display
Famous quotes containing the words incandescent, lamp and/or version:
“Dont think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.... Think if Tiffanys made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!”
—Brenda Ueland (18911985)
“How can they know
Truth flourishes where the students lamp has shone,
And there alone, that have no solitude?
So the crowd come they care not what may come.
They have loud music, hope every day renewed
And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.”
—William Butler Yeats (18651939)
“Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)